Wine making, Tbilisi 21 September 2010

Bato, Peters favourite taxi-driver and friend said that we could use his equipment for wine making to make our own wine, an offer we could not refuse!

Bato and Peter bought 120 kg. grapes, and we were ready for the wine making.

Bato picked us up and we drove to his house in the outskirt of Tbilisi, where he, his wife and sister had a nice house with a very friendly and very big dog plus a cow, who we did not meet, as it was parked somewhere outside.

Then we stated the wine making using a good old equipment.

After the wine making Bato invited us for supra (the wine making did not take long time and was merely an excuse), and we had a very nice dinner with lots of food and wine.

Alazani River, 17 September 2010

The Alazani River at the place of sampling


On the surface and below stones you find many animals


In rivers and streams macroinvertebrates (small animals visible with the naked eye) is used in the biomonitoring. Among them are the larva of stoneflies, the biggest animals in the plastic tray.






The number of animals for each species is also important to get knowledge on the environmental situation from the macroinvertebrate monitoring. To get this quantitative information a special net and technique called kick-sampling is used


A small tributary to the Alazani River where we also did biological sampling.



The Georgian partner for our Kura project asked us to help them in introducing biological monitoring and using the equipment for this purpose delivered by the EU. They had employed a new staff member to work with the biological monitoring, and he needed some training.

First we visited their laboratory and looking at the equipment. We agree to join their normal chemical sampling in the Alazani River and make some biological sampling at the same stations at which they would take water samples for chemical analysis.

Kutaisi, 11 – 12 September 2010

There was no light in the caves and a very bad smell - Eka thought that hell would be like this.




View from the Bagrati Cathedral. Bagrati Cathedral is an 11th century cathedral church perched atop the Uk'imerioni Hill.

11 – 12 August 2010 we (some of my colleagues on the project and I) made a weekend trip to Kutaisi . Kutaisi is Georgia's second largest city and the capital of the western region of Imereti. It is 221 west of Tbilisi.

We wanted to visit a part of the a karst area at a height of 1000 meter, and some caves outside Kutaisi. Karst topography is a landscape shaped by the dissolution of a layer or layers of soluble bedrock, usually carbonate rock such as limestone or dolomite. The fact that the bedrock is soluble result often in impressive landscape formation and the creation of caves.

We started early in the morning from Tbilisi in heavy rain, but during the long drive the weather gradually improved.

We had a nice weekend looking at Kutaisi and the Karst formations both above and below the ground.